Visual perception, and the whole in relation to the sum of its parts
The importance of gestalt principles to design is well documented, and Max Wertheimer, along with Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler, are widely recognised as its founders. For an overview of gestalt psychology see Ward (2025), but for those not familiar with the ideas it introduces it might be worth mentioning Wertheimer’s first observations about apparent movement. A line of flashing lights are aligned and synchronised such that as each light turns off, the adjacent light turns on. There is no movement here of course just a row of flashing lights, but seen as a whole we get a sense of the light moving along the row. From this we might conclude that there is something emergent that comes from the row of lights that is not found in all of the flashing lights viewed in isolation. This is the core idea of gestalt psychology, that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts [and that] we don’t perceive isolated elements; we perceive unified wholes’ (Ward, 2025, 1).
In chapter two of his book, Ward reviews the six core principles that are often cited with respect to gestalt theory, these are:
Law of Prägnanz (Law of Simplicity)[…]
Law of Proximity (Grouping Based on Closeness) […]
Law of Similarity (Grouping Based on Likeness) […]
Law of Continuity (Seeing Smooth Paths, Not Disjointed Ones)
Law of Closure (Filling in Missing Information) […]
Law of Figure Ground (Separating Foreground from Background)
Ward, 2025, 21–36 {capitalisation in the original]
Keeping our focus firmly on the Lego model of Willis Tower, the first three of these laws seem particularly appropriate. The law of simplicity leads us to see the model as one form. We can deconstruct it in quite simple ways, perhaps as nine rectangular blocks of various heights, or alternatively, as one rectangular block with seven rectangular shapes removed from it (if we ignore the addition of the two cylindrical masts). But it’s much more difficult to perceive all of the individual bricks that make up the model.
The law of proximity leads us to group all the bricks since they are not only close to one another but conjoined. Even though the masts are a different shape and colour to the rest of the model the law of proximity overrides these differences enabling us to see the tower as one form—albeit with sub-forms. The law of proximity provides a powerful tool for analysing typography—letters that are closer together make words, words that are closer together make lines, and, if one employs paragraph spacing, lines of text that are closer together make paragraphs. Furthermore, captions that are close to images link the caption to the image, and so forth.
The law of similarity leads us to group the shiny plastic textures as one whole, the shape of the bricks may have some differences but the rectangular bricks have all the same height and width.
A key insight from gestalt theory is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,
The gestalt laws of simplicity, proximity, and similarity (and probably other of the laws too) relate not only to our experiencing of the Lego model, but to design in general.
Once again it is easy to overlook all this work that goes on automatically, and in the background of our experience, we just unproblematically ‘see’ the form of the model. I have put ‘see’ in inverted commas here because our visual experience is not based only on bottom-up sensory data supplied by our eyes, there is a vast amount of top-down cognitive processing involved also.
There is another theory that complements gestalt theory, this will be explored in other essays, and this is primary metaphor theory. And there are a number of primary metaphors that have been proposed that echo, for example, the law of proximity, such as proximity is similarity.
Illustration above uses 3d model by:
Damien Roux [Darats]
The LDraw Parts Library
https://library.ldraw.org/omr/sets/72